On 1/14/07, Sören Auer <soeren(a)pediax.org> wrote:
Why not opt-out? If it's a good feature, we
should take the step of
giving it to people by default. If it's too intrusive, perhaps we can
finetune it?
I guess the intrusiveness will be the least problem. If you add this
feature to Wikipedia per default, Wikipedia servers would have to be
doubled, at least (each such preview counts on the server side like
accessing a complete article).
Sören
If you make it opt-out you will simply lose a lot of editors who aren't
tech-savvy. The reason Wikipedia has a plethora of tech articles compared
to other areas may be that the majority of Wiki editors are people who spend
a lot of time on-line. There are other editors, plugging away in non-tech
subject areas who aren't that tech-savvy, who would simply bow out if faced
with pop-ups on their first edit. It's the tech-savvy who are most likely
to understand that they have options and opt-in, and the non tech-savvy who
would be least able to figure out how to opt-out. Given that it doesn't
make sense to make it opt-out. Also, the whole world isn't on-line at the
rate of the Western-world. I used a friend's clunker machine, with a
stone-age modem, and I think the pop-ups would crash the system. So, it's
also those with the lease capacity to opt-out (namely because their machine
crashes when they log in), who could be most impacted. Again, opt-out of
the heavy tech requirements is not the sensible option. Opt-in for the tech
savvy who will always look for it, is sensible. My siblings, all of whom
are uber tech-savvy, can't sign up for a web site without spending the
first few minutes configuring the site for their preferences--I realize now,
for the first time, that adding things like this pop-ups program are what
they are doing.
KP